Ms. Portman’s Jackie is a mesmerizing presence. She is stiff the way celebrated women were in the early 1960s, in her comportment as well as her hair. […]

Natalie Portman’s portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy during and immediately after her husband’s assassination rises above impersonation to an eerie kind of incarnation: She’s got the voice, the look and a devastated spirit that still has plenty of steel…For those who remember exactly where they were when the news came in, some of these blood-soaked images retain the power to evoke astonishingly strong feelings of shock and grief. This is by way of saying I may have seen a different “Jackie” than others will see, one that made me recoil at replayed moments of horror, and sometimes squirm like a voyeur. But Pablo Larraín has made a strangely conflicted film that portrays Jackie as an obsessive mythmaker and keeper of the flame—an ironic, provocative approach—yet celebrates the Camelot myth in the process. […]

Does it also feel right that the film, following Jackie back to the White House after the flight from Dallas, tracks her solitary wanderings through silent, empty rooms and into the shower, where she washes her husband’s dried blood from her body? No and yes. Some of that left me feeling queasy, an accessory to a break-in on an icon’s privacy. All the same, following her in the hours after the assassination is a terrific idea for part of a movie, a part that’s irresistible to watch…

The film’s contradictions intersect most vividly toward the end, when Jackie, passing a department store in a limousine, sees mannequins in a succession of windows wearing her signature dresses. That could also be taken as ironic—the architect of the image-building project has become its surviving subject. But the scene, like so much in the film, plays sentimentally. She is ruefully, tragically alone…

At home, on most days, she is up at 6 a.m., cooking breakfast and getting the kids ready for school—not the stereotypical image of a movie star. “Do you have to use that word?” she asks, wincing. “I’ve always been so uncomfortable with that. I just don’t feel like one, and I don’t live like one either—not the way I imagine a proper movie star living.” […]

I didn’t plan on its being that way,” Winslet says. “And f— me, it hasn’t been easy, you know.” Noting that the tabloids tried and failed to detail how and why her earlier marriages unraveled, she adds, “No one really knows what has happened in my life. No one really knows why my first marriage didn’t last; no one knows why my second didn’t. And I’m proud of those silences.” […]

She admits to a lot of self-criticism when she was younger, but “thank God all that s—’s evaporated,” she says. “We all focus on our bodies in our late teens and our early 20s, in a way that is just not cool or healthy. In your 30s, you become aware of staying fit. Now I view my physical self as an instrument that I have to keep going because I’m a mother, and I have to be as healthy as I can for those three people who need me—more than I need for myself to be in a f—ing nude scene.” […]

Recently, Winslet has found herself in a new phase of her career. “When you get older, you’ve got to become more interesting. That’s why you have to choose the right parts,” says Primorac, mentioning the resolution of today’s digital cameras, which magnify every physical flaw. “I’ve done lots of films where Kate is the amazingly sexy leading lady, but now she’s more interested in the parts where she can frown and she can have wrinkles in her forehead. Instead of worrying, ‘Am I going to look good next to Liam Hemsworth?’—which she still does, by the way—she’s more interested in a great role.” […]

I want to read a script and go, ‘Holy s—, how the hell would I ever play that role?’ And then find myself somehow playing it,” she says, laughing. “I want to always be doing this. I want to grow and I want to change and I want to freak myself out.” Part of that process will be turning 40 this month, a birthday Winslet is sanguine about. “I have not wasted a second,” she says with a smile. “Good God, have I made the most of those 40 years.”

“In Hopper’s paintings we can stare at the most familiar scenes and feel that they are essentially remote, even unknown. People look into space. They seem to be elsewhere, lost in a secrecy the paintings cannot disclose and we can only guess at. It is as if we were spectators at an event we were unable to name; we feel the presence of what is hidden, of what surely exists but is not revealed. By formalizing privacy, by giving it a space where it can be witnessed without being violated. Hopper’s rooms become sad havens of desire. We want to know more about what goes on in them, but of course we cannot. The silence that accompanies our viewing seems to increase. It is unsettling. It weighs on us like solitude. “

— Mark Strand, Hopper

The first image is Edward Hopper’s 1952 painting titled Morning Sun. The second, is a screen shot from the film “From Shirley – Visions of Reality” where Austrian Director Gustav Deutsch has recreated 13 of Hopper’s better-known paintings with images that bear an uncanny cinematic recreation of Hopper’s works. Hopper’s paintings are brought alive by the film, telling the story of a woman, whose thoughts, emotions and contemplations lets us observe an era in American history. Shirley is a woman in America in the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and early ‘60s.” (Phaidon)

Designer Nick Barclay, takes some of our favorite films, like The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, and Forrest Gump, and turns them into clever works of art. Check out his other movie posters here: My Modern Met.

The poster above is for the movie Forrest Gump. If you need some help to understand what it represents, the answer is here: Forrest Gump.

I just want to rise so high that no one can reach me and nothing to prove. I just want to get where you just awaken your body and soul to something. Stillness arises within me. Nature brought me to stillness.

No idea. Hard to explain why I was drawn to this. I do recall my finger hovering over the “BUY NOW” button on Amazon and wondering if this will be yet another abandoned, start-but-not-come-close-to-finishing e-book, in my groaning stack of Incompletes weighing on my consciousness.

Why a book by a film director? Do you have interest in film production?

None.

Why this book then? A dense 600-pager with footnotes?

Pay attention. Refer back to question 1. (No idea). In hindsight, I do think that perhaps I was attracted by the potential of finding my community, a brotherhood in “A Guide for the Perplexed” and possibly finding my way out. And I heard a bell – – far softer than a Siren, gentler than a Clarion Call, a chime of sorts from William Stafford: “Listen—something else hovers out here, not color, not outlines or depth when air relieves distance by hazing far mountains, but some total feeling or other world almost coming forward, like when a bell sounds and then leaves the whole countryside waiting.”